Paper

One ton of recycled paper saves:

• 4,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity
• 7,000 gallons of water
• 100 gallons of gasoline
• 60 pounds of air pollution

I've heard that recycling paper is actually counter-productive because of the amount of gasoline it takes to transport it to a recycling center and then the energy required to actually recycle it. Of course, the benefit of not using more trees would not be negated. Does anyone know if this is true? I don't exactly have the time to poke around looking for hard numbers on this one.

Another Gas Website

This one includes nifty extras such as price trending charts, price map (broken down by county), etc.

See also, this previous post.

Some Handy Web Resources

• A bandwidth performance tester. (If you don't know what that means, you don't need it ;-))
• Ever wonder where those "stock" photos of people, places, and things that you see all over come from? iStockPhoto.com of course!
• This Lightweight Visual Thesaurus is pretty cool. Try it out (because it will take a lot less time and be much more effective than me trying to explain in words how it works). N.B. - I know of a couple of tools like this that are available on the web, but this is the only free one of which I am aware. Also note that you can drag and drop the anchors of the visual as you see fit (which is handy since the system does not always present it in the most user friendly fashion.
  

Interesting Facts

• 10% of every human ever born are alive right now.

• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

Wires

There are 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire strung across the Unites States.

Blue Lobsters

Apparently, 1 in 5000 North Atlantic lobsters are born bright blue.

English Trivia

'Underground' is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."

"The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in English.

Interesting way to nurse one's young

"An amphibious wormlike creature has been found in Kenya whose young feed on their mother's skin. . . Nursing mothers of Boulengerula taitanus,– part of a group of tropical, legless terrestrial amphibians called the caecilians,– transform the top layer of their skin from its usual flat, dead cells to a thicker layer of large cells rich in protein and fats in order to nurture their young. The nutrient content of this skin layer is similar to that of milk. . . The infants . . . are born with modified teeth that allow them to scrape off the top layer of their mother'’s skin."

Click here to read the full story. The really interested among you may want to watch the video :-)

Undersea Volcano

Just thought this was a cool story that you all may enjoy.

Call Centers

"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"
"What we do every night, Pinky . . . . . . . try to create a Call Center for every business model known to man!"